Karl Marx’s work during his final years of life, between 1881 and 1883, is one of the least developed areas in Marx studies. This neglect is partially due to the fact that Marx’s infirmities in his final years kept him from sustaining his regular writing activity — there are virtually no published works from the period.

Absent the milestones that marked Marx’s earlier work, from his early philosophical writings to his later studies of political economy, Marx’s biographers have long regarded his final years as a minor chapter marked by declining health and dwindling intellectual capacities.

However, there is a growing body of research that suggests this is not the full story, and that Marx’s final years might actually be a gold mine filled with new insights into his thought. Largely contained in letters, notebooks, and other “marginalia,” Marx’s late writings portray a man who, far from the received stories of decline, continued to wrestle with his own ideas about capitalism as a global mode of production. As suggested by his late research into so-called “primitive societies,” the nineteenth-century Russian agrarian commune, and the “national question” in European colonies, Marx’s writings from the period actually reveal a mind turning over the real-world implications and complexities of his own thought, particularly as they concerned the expansion of capitalism beyond European borders.